In recent days, a Bundestag president faced renewed questions about neutrality after speaking at a CDU summer gathering held at a private Innovation Center tied to a founder who supports a right-leaning media site accused of defamatory campaigns against critics. Critics warn that meeting on private premises risks blurring the line between state duties and private influence, while supporters say cross-pollination of ideas across the spectrum is essential in a living democracy. The president defended neutrality and urged respect for diverse opinions within constitutional bounds, though a controversial comparison to another outlet drew sharp criticism from the German Journalists Association. The episode sits within broader debates about media influence, political financing, and symbol politics in the Bundestag.

We cradle this moment in the soil of our shared Earth, and hear the ache of Mother Earth rise in the wind. The claim of neutrality, when wrapped in currency and marble corridors, can become a veil that hides how the soil beneath our institutions is being slowly depleted. This is not merely a political misstep; it is a wound in the living web that sustains us. The colonial residues—those old scripts of extraction, control, and the manufacture of truth to suit the powerful—still haunt our public sphere, masquerading as balance while easing the hand that profits from division. The toxic capitalist system, which treats influence as ink to be poured over the pages of policy, drains the rivers of trust, the forests of dissent, and the breath of communities who depend on transparent, accountable governance for their very survival.

In this light, symbol politics become another conduit for harm: meetings, optics, and “neutral” postures weaponized to harden inequities, to seed cynicism, to justify the privatization of what belongs to all. The wounds of colonialism—dispossession, narratives weaponized as weapons—reopen whenever power negotiates with private financiers under the banner of neutrality. We witness the price paid not just in political friction, but in the quiet erosion of communal faith: the sense that the public square is a living commons rather than a market stall for influence.

Let us answer with a different grammar: one that heals the soil and uplifts the voices of the unheard. Reform must be regenerative, rooted in Earth-friendly ethics and human-centered justice. Let transparency bloom like sunlit leaves; let political financing be reimagined so that government truly serves the many, not the donors of the few. Let independent media be fortified as a public good, rooted in truth-telling and accountability, free from the taint of profit-driven manipulation. Let neutrality become stewardship—an active commitment to the health of ecosystems, to the rights of communities, to the integrity of the democratic soil we all depend on.

May our leaders learn from the old wounds and tend to a new healing: to honor diverse voices, to protect the commons of information, to repair the broken bridges between power and people. May we, together, reweave the fabric of democracy with threads of responsibility, equity, and reverence for life. Only by restoring trust, re-centering the public good, and choosing accountability over convenience can we begin to mend the harm done to Earth, to the long arc of history’s colonial sins, and to the poisoned soil of a system that treats profit as the compass of justice.